On debating theology in public forums

St Gregory of Nazianzus wrote in one of his theological orations against the Christian mistake of debating theology before a worldly audience (cf. John 13:35). It's hard not to apply this wisdom to some conversations I occasionally get baited into on social media.

We must not be like fiery, unruly horses, throwing Reason our rider and spitting out the bit of Discretion which so usefully restrains us, and running wide of the turning post. Let us conduct our debates within our frontiers, and not be carried away to Egypt or dragged off to Assyria. Let us not "sing the song of the Lord in a foreign land," by which I mean before any and every audience, heathen or Christian, friend or foe, sympathetic or hostile: these keep all too close a watch on us, and they would wish that the spark of our dissensions might become a conflagration; they kindle it, they fan it, by means of its own draught they raise it to the skies, and without our knowing what they are up to, they make it higher than those flames at Babylon which blazed all around. Having no strength in their own teaching, they hunt for it in our weakness, and for this reason like flies settling on wounds, they settle on our misfortunes.

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We must recognize that as in dress, diet, laughter, and deportment there are certain standards of decency, the same is true of utterance and silence, particularly as we pay especial honor to "The Word" among the titles and properties of God. Let even our contentiousness be governed by rules.

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​Why do we allow audiences hostile to our subject matter to listen to discussion of the "generation" and "creation" of God, or of God's "production from non-being," and such dissections, and distinctions, and analyses? Why do we appoint our accusers as our judges? Why do we put swords into our enemies' hands? How, I ask you, will such a discussion be interpreted by the man who subscribes to a creed of adulteries and infanticides, who worships the passions, who is incapable of conceiving of anything higher than the body, who fabricated his own gods only the other day, and gods at that distinguished by their utter vileness? What sort of construction will he put on it? Is he not certain to take it in a crude, obscene, material sense, as is his wont? Will he not appropriate your theology to defend his own gods and passions? If we abuse these terms ourselves, it will be difficult indeed to persuade such people to accept our way of thinking: and if they have a natural inclination "to invent new kinds of evil," how could they resist the evil we offer them? This is what our civil war leads to. This is what we achieve by fighting for the Word with greater violence than is pleasing to the Word. We are in the same state as madmen who set fire to their own houses, tear their own children limb from limb, or reject their own parents, regarding them as strangers.